ooling a number of coaches, commentators and even full football teams since early September, the senile gang of Geritol-guzzlers known as the Oakland Raiders were finally unmasked and had their walkers pulled out from under them by a lightning-swift squad of relentless assassins that call themselves the Tampa Bay Buccaneers here Sunday in Super Bowl XXXVII.

The hapless Raiders turned off their hearing aids, took out their dentures, curled up and lay down together on the 50-yard line, happily playing Roman-era Christians to the Bucs' roaring lions. When the final gun sounded, the sky was rent, the sun became as sackcloth, and lo, the moon became as Al Davis' pompadoured head. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the Raiders' fans, and much cheering and ritual spilling of virgin blood from the fans of the Buccaneers. The final score was 487 to 13, but it wasn't really as close as all that.

Quarterback Brad Johnson, 12 and-a-half-year-old leader of the Tampa Bay eleven, completed over 800 passes, while 9-year-old wunderkicker Martin Gramatica booted so many field goals that the officials simply lost count and awarded the team a collective 212 additional points in the fourth quarter.

Commented 96-year-old wide receiver Jerry Rice, "What did you say? Did I take my medicine today? My granddaughter brings that fool-ass boyfriend of hers—he steals my stuff out of the garage. Huh? Who are you, anyway?"

Rice, who scored the only Raider touchdown on a 48-yard pass in the third quarter, became the oldest man to ever score a touchdown in a football game, let alone a Super Bowl. He was able to get open when two Tampa Bay defensive backs were caught out of position while giving the business to three of the "really cute" cheerleaders in the parking lot outside Qualcomm Stadium. Rice said he would have joined the defensive backs if only he'd seen the cheerleaders as well, but "I didn't have my distance glasses with me today. Besides, at my age, I need to tie a popsicle stick to it to get it to work anyway. Wait—who are you again?"

Wide receiver Tim Brown, a comparative youngster at age 88, and only slightly more lucid, added, "You know, we play them one game at a time. It's all right, we'll win next week." Reminded that the Super Bowl marks the end of football season, Brown responded, "The what? No, no, we play the Baltimore Colts next week, I'm sure of it. That Unitas fella, he's a tough bird. Did I take my medicine today?"

Ninety-three-year-old quarterback Rich Gannon: "We got jobbed by the refs on the coin toss. Did you see it? Everybody hates the Raiders, son. Everybody. Anyway, aren't we playing Sid Gillman's squad next week? We got to start planning for that game soon." Gannon set a record by having 37 passes intercepted and run back for touchdowns, 26 in the first half alone, and 16 other passes intercepted and mailed directly to various Tampa players' homes to be auctioned off for top dollar on eBay sometime in the next month.

"Huh? Maybe I'll bid on one of those," said Gannon, before he walked off the field aimlessly and was finally picked up in a bad neighborhood in Chula Vista, where he had been asking residents if they had seen his pajamas and whether or not he had taken his medicine that morning.

Defensive lineman Warren Sapp, a grizzled Buccaneer veteran at 16, had an amazing 73 sacks, 326 tackles and two hurries. He is known to his Tampa Bay teammates as "that raging fucking lunatic, watch out he doesn't get too close to you, he'll break both your legs and shatter a kneecap just as soon as look at you." When asked for a post-game comment, he began screaming gutturally and waving his helmet around him in a wide circle for close to twenty minutes, his eyes nearly bugging out of his head the whole time.

"Agga-ragga-wompona-wooo-hooo-haaa!! Whooo-ooo-eeeee sumbitch mothafuckin' sheeee-it bitch and a bastard god-DAYUM fuckin' ay!" he finally concluded. Asked for his assessment of the defensive plan, Sapp just muttered, "Fuck that, man, I'm dizzy," then said something completely unintelligible and threw up on NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue's tassled loafers.

Teammate Ronde Barber, a defensive back who will turn 14 next month, just shook his head at Sapp's antics and murmured, "At least he ain't got the rattlesnakes in his hands and his mouth this time. That's when he's really scary."

Asked if he could sum up the Bucs' strategy going into the game, Barber concurred with 11-year-old linebacker Derrick Brooks and head coach Jon Gruden, 20, that "The main thing was knees in the nuts from the word go, man, then slappin' them on they liver spots and talkin' shit about they grandchildren."

ich, dumb, white president George W. Bush, the "W" possibly standing for "Whitey," took the opportunity on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday Wednesday to show where he stood on civil rights by denouncing the University of Michigan's affirmative action admissions policy.

It comes as a real shock to a handful of people who buy entirely into presidential soundbytes and vote-grabbing. The Bush administration has attempted to court minorities with promises of real changes in civil rights, though perhaps Bush intended the change to be a step backward and just purposely omitted saying what kind of change he was talking about.

Plaintiffs, also exceedingly white people from mostly non-impoverished families, have filed a lawsuit against the University of Michigan because they were not admitted to the school while members of minority groups were admitted, with possibly lower scores in some cases. University of Michigan policy allows for a points-based system that allows ethnic diversity as a deciding factor for admissions, and, in short, they had more white people than they could use, which is often the case with white people.

In a petition supporting the plaintiffs' case against U of M, Bush, with the help of many white White House staff people, wrote, "At their core the Michigan policies amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students based solely on their race," the president said. Basically, the fact they are minorities is an unfair advantage to them, wrote the rich son of an ex-president.

Later, to a White House press group, Bush continued, "It's the American way for people to overcome diversity, ain't it? That's what I'm trying to do here."

When Bush was told he sounded like an asshole by aides, he amended his statements later.

"What I meaned to have said, is that overcoming obstacles and stuff is real hard. And getting into college is real hard. Ethnic people of all races should have to overcome their own obstacles to get in and not get in because of they races—be they black, white, brown, or Arabs. It's unfair to let people in because of they skin color. This policy of racist-based admission provides an unfair 'vantage to non-white people, and I cannot abide that. I guarantee you if this policy was in place where I went to school, I would not have gotten in."

Spokespeople for the University of Michigan agreed: "It's true. Bush never would have gotten in here."

Many congressman, also rich and white, have opposed Bush's stance on affirmative action. Besides Democratic presidential hopefuls for 2004, a handful of Republican senators pleaded with Bush via letter before the announcement to resist supporting the plaintiffs. The decision, they said, would do harm to the system of higher education.

It is believed the president received the letter before issuing his petition, but aides say he may not have read it since it looked really long and used a number of words that he didn't want to have to look up.

Following on Trent Lott's pro-segregationist remarks in December and his thousands of failed apologies in its wake, the move could do a lot to damage the "compassionate conservatism" agenda by the Republican party to embrace minorities while still keeping them at arm's length.

According to some within the GOP, Bush must quickly again issue pro-unity words as quickly as possible to reaffirm that position, and preferably before taxes are again raised on the working classes.

Hey commune:

Grady Volsang here again, for the first time. Pissed off? Yeah, that's right. You must've got a warning call from my wife. Seems like you can't piss out a window in this town without cheesing off some bleeding-heart liberal, that's what I've noticed. But I'll be a pitbull's bitch if I give a greased Jesus what those weasels think. I've said it before, and I'll say it again this afternoon, after my hydrotherapy: I'm done with Donettes. You know, those little donuts that come in a package? Yep, through with them. Finished, kaput. Don't even try to sell me any, because you'll be sorely disappointed. I've eaten those things every day for forty years and I still haven't had a good one. So you know what? Nuts to you, Mr. Donette. You had your chance. From now on I'm taking my business to the Sno-Balls camp. I hear they know how to treat a fella.

Grady Volsang
Verno Beach, FL


Dear Grady:

We here at the commune couldn't agree with you more, Grady, even if we knew what you were talking about. What is clear, however, is that you are some kind of missing link that science has spent eons in search of. Your unfortunate body could speak volumes to the right researchers, about the effects that ingesting several tons of stale donut meal over the decades could have on blood pressure, IQ, running speed, cancer of the ass, and one's resistance to being gutshot. You owe it to America, Grady, to be autopsied immediately.

the commune

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Editor's Note: the commune is not responsible for anything we may have done while under the influence of pure cane sugar.

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